She yanked open the door and fled once more into the night.

She was running through a tall hedge into a neighbor’s backyard when she heard the boom of a gun. Maybe the shooter would get lucky. You couldn’t kill a demon with a gun, but you could destroy its current guise and force it to take time to re-form. If that happened, it would be done chasing after her.

But she knew she couldn’t count on that. She couldn’t count on anything except that the demon would keep coming. She crossed through several more backyards, then caught sight of something that might save her. A transit bus was just pulling to a stop down the street. She broke from between the houses and raced for it, yelling at the top of her lungs, waving her arms wildly. She saw the bus driver turn and look at her. The look was a familiar one by now. She didn’t care. She raced around the front of the bus and through the open door.

“Hey, what’s going on?” the driver demanded as she dug frantically into her pockets for some change.

“Just close the door and start driving,” she ordered, glancing quickly over her shoulder.

Whatever he saw on her face convinced him not to argue. He closed the doors and put the bus in gear. The bus swung away from the curb and into the street, rain beating against its wide front windows.

She had just begun to make her way down the aisle when something heavy crashed into the doors, causing the metal to buckle and the glass to splinter. There were only three other passengers on the bus, and all three froze, eyes bright with shock and fear. The driver cursed and stepped on the gas. Nest wheeled back toward the damaged doors, hanging on the metal bar of a seat back for support, searching the darkness beyond.

A huge, wolfish shadow was running next to the bus, eyes gleaming brightly in the night.

Then a police car crested the hill in front of them, coming fast, lights flashing. It swept past without slowing, searchlight cutting through the rainy dark.

The shadow disappeared.

Nest exhaled slowly and slipped into the seat beside her, heart pounding in her chest. When she looked down at her hands, she saw that they were shaking.

The ride back into the city was a blur. Once she determined that the bus was going in the right direction, she quit paying attention. People got on and off, but she didn’t look at their faces. She stared out the window into the darkness, thinking.

It took a long time for the fear to subside, and when it did she was filled with cold rage. Three lives had been snuffed out quicker than a candle’s flame, and no one but she even knew about it and no one but she cared. Boot, Audrey, and Ariel—a sylvan, an owl, and a tatterdemalion. Creatures of the forest, of magic and imagination. Humans didn’t even know they existed. What difference did their loss make to anything? The unfairness of it burned inside her. She struggled for a time with the possibility that she was to blame for what had happened, that she had brought the demon down on them. But there was no reason to believe this was so, and her guilt stemmed mostly from the fact they were dead and she was alive. But barely alive, she kept reminding herself. Alive, because she had been fortunate enough to step off a cliff and survive the fall. Alive, because she had evaded a handful of serious attempts by a monster to rip her to shreds.